Dear Apostolis, I don't believe you can simpliy wish politics away, and look for technocratic solutions based on mathematics, and I also think it has been shown that the Power Law operates in every distiributed network.
In my opinion, what is needed are 'counter-measures' that balance power law tendencies with their opposite, which is exactly what the greek democracy did, but also the free cities in medieval Europe. But all of these were also a direct result of politics. The greek democracy was based on the revolt of the people against debt slavery, and because the sailors-proletarians were armed; the medieval councils were based on the power of the guilds and the city militias which could act against the nobility ... It's less mathematics that will help us, than 'group threshold' anthropology and other in-group vs out group findings of evolutionary psychology, which show more precisely when democratic ingroup processes start to break down. The Norwegian Terje Bongard, in his book Biological Man, has recently published a whole book outlining such an approach. Peer production has shown us that the global scaling of small group dynamics is now possible; can we apply this to politics as well? Some ideal combination of permanent individual expression of choices (such as the liquid feedback system of proxy voting), small-group deliberation, could augment any system of representation that is still needed where down-scaling is not possible .. All of this is however, dependent on popular mobilization, as much as on real-life experimentation of real peer production communities that have successfully defended their autonomy, or in other words: messy politics Michel XXX Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:14:07 +0200 From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us? To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Message-ID: <caox4e5f+744hzv4fx8pfc9ly4g84tja5n29f4nmv8cfqoje...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Letting people literally become the state is the best way to protect Democracy. But how efficient is this? The good thing is that today we have the internet and thus it is much easier to have a decentralized state by the people, thus solutions like these could for some things scale without costing a lot. I wonder if there has been any mathematical research for the amount of decentralization that is required so that a hegemonic class doesnt emerge. I'd prefer it to be mathematical because I know a lot of opinions on this matter which are always interrelated with one's political agenda.(reformist,anarchist,revolutionary marxist,capitalist) -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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